Author: Papa Giorgio

The Discovery Institute Wins A Legal Challenge

Published by Papa Giorgio

California Science Center (CSC) Has Agreed To Settle A Lawsuit With The Pro-Intelligent Design Discovery Institute from Papa Giorgio on Vimeo.

California Science Center to Pay Attorneys’ Fees and Settle Open Records Lawsuit by Intelligent Design Group

The California Science Center (CSC) has agreed to settle a lawsuit with the pro-intelligent design Discovery Institute and release records that it previously sought to conceal regarding its cancellation of the screening of a pro-intelligent design film last year.

“After months of stonewalling by the Science Center, this is a huge victory for the public’s right to know what their government is doing, especially when the government engages in illegal censorship and viewpoint discrimination,” said Dr. John West, Associate Director of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture.

The Science Center continues to “deny any and all liability relating to the claims,” according to the settlement agreement. However, it agreed to pay Discovery Institute’s legal fees and to surrender more than a thousand pages of documents it had been withholding since they were requested under the California Public Records Act last year.

Documents to be released relate to the Science Center’s cancellation of a screening of the science documentary Darwin’s Dilemma in its IMAX theater by the non-partisan American Freedom Alliance (AFA) last October. The AFA has filed its own free speech and breach of contract suit against the Science Center, which is still pending. Darwin’s Dilemma investigates the intelligent design of organisms during the “Cambrian Explosion” more than 500 million years ago.

The Science Center claimed that it had turned over all the documents requested by Discovery Institute, but when Institute staff learned that this was not true the Institute filed suit to compel full disclosure. In response, the CSC made the incredible claim that its key decision-makers, clearly identified as CSC staff on the museum’s website, were really employed not by the museum but by a private foundation and so were immune from the public records request.

“It was an obvious shell game,” explained Discovery Institute staff attorney Casey Luskin. “The California Science Center is a state agency funded by California taxpayers. The public has a right to expect transparency, not secrecy, in government institutions. The Science Center’s attempt to evade public accountability for its actions has been disgraceful.”

Discovery Institute was represented in its lawsuit by Peter Lepiscopo of Lepiscopo & Morrow (San Diego and Sacramento).

Elana Kagan Quotes (approvingly) Natioanal Socialist (nazi) Economist

Published by Papa Giorgio

This is an important post by Libertarian Republican. It shows how Left usually is. They were the racists in the Civil War (separatists and segregationists), they were the eugenicists/Nazi’s of the 20′ through WWII, they were the people standing in front of schools not wanting black kids in the same school as their kids, and they elected a black nationalist President. So the following on Kagan should come as no surprise:

One of the longest standing and most respected conservative journals Human Events, recently uncovered some shocking information on Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. She repeatedly cited a 20th century European Marxist-turned-Nazi Werner Sombert in her college thesis paper…

[….]

and now…

  • Kagan and her citing of Marxist/National Socialist Werner Sombart in her college thesis paper = zero mainstream media coverage.

Here is a larger portion of the Human Events article:

…During World War I, however, Sombart endorsed Germany’s “heroic” war against the “capitalist spirit” represented by England. In 1934, Sombart published Deutscher Sozialismus, which advocated the “total ordering of life” as an expression of the German Volksgeist, or “national spirit.”

…In the introduction to her 1981 thesis, Kagan addresses a question famously asked by Sombart: Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten keinen Sozialismus? — “Why is there no socialism in the United States?”

“The Socialist Party of the United States could not lay claim to the kind of pure proletarianism that Sombart considered essential to any socialist movement; indeed, most of the party’s members did not even consider this a worthy goal,” Kagan wrote on Page 3 of the thesis. “But the American socialists ‘failure’ to build a movement that even resembled Sombart’s idealized notion of a class-conscious party . . . did not render their party any less significant. Nor did such a failure render their party any less successful. In the first two decades of the twentieth century the American socialist movement, whose very existence Sombart refused to consider, grew if not by leaps and bounds at least by inches.”

In the final pages of her thesis — To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933 — Kagan returns to Sombart’s theories, writing: “Why, in particular, did the socialist movement never become an alternative to the nation’s established parties? In answering this question, historians have often called attention to various characteristics of American society that have militated against widespread acceptance of radical movements. These societal traits — an ethnically divided worked class, a relatively fluid class structure, an economy which allowed at least some workers to enjoy what Sombart termed ‘reefs of roast beef and apple pie,’ — prevented the early twentieth century socialists from attracting an immediate mass following. Such conditions did not, however, completely checkmate American socialism.”

Even before he embraced National Socialism, Sombart’s socialist theories reflected an anti-Semitic tendency that identified Jews with capitalism, a theme explored in his 1911 book, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (“The Jews and Economics,” which was published in a 1913 English translation titled, The Jews and Modern Capitalism). In his 1915 book Handler und Helden (“Merchants and Heroes”), Sombart praised the “heroic” German character, contrasting them with “Trading Peoples,” especially Jews, whose “commercial” habits Sombart depicted as prevailing among the English.

The influence of Sombart, who died in 1942 at age 78, was scornfully cited in Friedrich Hayek’s famous 1944 book The Road to Serfdom. In Chapter 12 of that book — “The Socialist Roots of Nazism” — Hayek said that Sombart “had done as much as any man to spread socialist ideas and anticapitalist resentment of varying shades throughout Germany.”

Hayek also mentioned this in note #13 in the first chapter of The Road to Serfdom:

  • Historian of the development of capitalism Werner Sombart (1863-1941) was perhaps the last of the historical school economists. Hayek would view his move from left-wing socialism toward anticapitalism of the fascist variety as exemplifying a natural tendency.

Test: Which Is Specifically Mentioned As Pagan In The Bible

Published by Papa Giorgio

Tattoos…

or, Bowl-Cuts?

If you answered tattoos, you would be wrong. (Actually, if you do either for pagan religious observances or obeisance, it is Biblically wrong/forbidden.) Here is my short dealing with this topic:

Tattoo’s and the Bible

Leviticus 19:28 states:

  • “You shall not make any cuts in your body for the dead, nor make any tattoo marks on yourselves…” (NASB).

Is this a forbiddance of getting a tattoo? Or was this written for a specific people, in a specific time, with a specific example in mind (God’s mind). Lets see what some commentators have to say on what this example would be that caused God to forbid marking or engraving on one’s body.

Matthew Henry’s Commentary: v. 28

  • “They shall make cuts or prints in their flesh for the dead; for the heathen did so to pacify the infernal deities…”

New Bible Commentary: vv. 29-31

  • “The main focus of this section is to exclude rites and practices associated with pagan, Canaanite religion, particularly those which were physically or morally disfiguring. Abuse of the body in the name of religion is a wide spread human aberration…”

The International Bible Commentary: v. 28

  • “Cutting the flesh was a feature of the worship of Melqart (Baal in Old Testament)…. There are various explanations of this self-disfigurement which have been advanced: to provide blood for a departed spirit, to render mourners unrecognizable to departed spirits, to drive away the spirits by the life-force resident in the blood, and so on…”

The point here is that if one were to interpret this in a wooden literal sense that applies to today’s tattooing of the body for non-religious purposes, then one would apply verse 27 to getting “bowl-cuts.” For we read: “You shall not round off the side-growth of your heads, nor harm the edges of your beard” (NASB).

Matthew Henry Commentary:

  • “Those that worshipped the hosts of heaven, in honor of them, cut their hair so that their heads might resemble the celestial globe; but, as the custom was foolish in itself, so being done with respect to their false gods, it was idolatrous.”

Yes, Matthew Henry just called the bowl-cut “foolish,” but when done for religious purposes, it is wrong, i.e., pagan. As with the tattoo, if done for paganistic spiritual purposes, it is forbidden. If done for personal reasons, especially to honor God in some way, I see no harm. If I am wrong, I suspect that when one receives their glorified body, it will be washed clean with the blood of Christ. making the entirety of the above arguments – both ways – mute. Because only then will we be perfect, the creation God originally intended.

To conclude: I see no clear precedence in the Bible for not getting a tattoo if done for non-pagan purposes. Again, if one were to interpret this in a legalistic sense, or not getting tattoos as somehow following the law, a maelstrom would soon follow (even haircuts in other words); not to mention the book of Romans and Galatians being thrown out the window. Remember to “live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God.” Sometimes figuring out how to live as a servant of God takes a life time of living, not a list.

An Old Debate On Which Came First: Animism or Monotheism

Published by Papa Giorgio

This is from a larger debate, so you are coming into the middle of a conversation, FYI. This is from about 10-years ago?

Jenny said:

The indigenous peoples in the South American rain forests, and the Aborigines of Australia (before the total infestation of the white man) are two examples. These peoples, who granted have a rudimentary religious standpoint, based not upon a supreme ruling god, but on many godlike entities or species, do not get their morals from a need to worship, or fear of reprisal, for their “gods” do not hold such power. And yet, murder and thievery is still considered as wrong to them as to us.

Two points that need to be made.  First, if you read closely my original three posts, you will see that I use C. S. Lewis’s point that man cannot think of a new moral code. So yes, all men, whether in the rainforest to New York City (more of a jungle) know ultimately good from evil (for the most part). Secondly, you seem to be referring to a theory which has long been discredited but I may be wrong, please enlighten me some more if you do not mean the following. Most atheists seem to think that monotheism (belief in one God) is of recent refinement. In the nineteenth century, two anthropologists, Sir Edward Tyler and Sir James Frazer, popularized the notion that the first stage in the evolution of religion was animism (which involved the worship of spirits believed to inhabit natural phenomena), followed later by pantheism (the idea that everything is divine), then polytheism (a belief in a multitude of distinct and separate deities), and eventually monotheism.

However, recent studies in anthropology have turned this scenario on its head and show, for example, that the hundreds of contemporary tribal religions (including many which are animistic) are not primitive in the sense of being original. Writing from long time experience in India (one of the oldest religious peoples in the world), and after extended studies of ancient religions, the modern scholar Robert Brow states, The tribes have a memory of a High God, who is no longer worshipped because he is not feared. Instead of offering sacrifice to him, they concern themselves with the pressing problems of how to appease the vicious spirits of the jungle.

Still, other research suggests that tribes are not animistic because they have continued unchanged since the dawn of history and that The evidence indicates degeneration from the true knowledge of one God.

Another example is that of the mystery that confounded Confucius. One of the earliest a recordings of the worship of ShangTi is in Shu Ching (Book of History, compiled by Confucius), where it is recorded of Emperor Shun (c.2230 B. C.) as offering a sacrifice to this monotheistic God. This event (once a year) has happened for 40 centuries, until, that is, until the atheists took over when the dynasty was deposed in 1911. Chinese history and oracle bones speak of a tower where all the worlds people were once gathered, not to mention the flood and even eight people surviving on a chest full of animals. India has the same except for a few details lost in history.

All the world’s oldest religions remember a monotheistic God that they worshipped. I would study this a wee bit more to understand exactly where religion came from. Because the empirical evidence indicates that men didn’t create it, we just distorted it. That it didn’t evolve, but devolve.

Deepest Blue State May Go Red?

Published by Papa Giorgio

Some news that may telegraph the November elections, from Libertarian Republican:

Maryland is the deepest of blue states. Martin O’Malley, a former top staffer for US Senator Barbara Mikulski is one of the most hardened leftwing radical Governors in the Nation. O’Malley raised the state income tax by 8 percent.

In 2005, O’Malley, then the Mayor of Baltimore, compared President Bush to a “9/11 Terrorist,” for his “massive spending cuts to local and state governments.”

Now a new poll has former Republican Governor Bob Ehrlich pulling ahead of O’Malley in a re-match of the 2006 contest where Ehrlich lost.

From Hedgehog:

GOVERNOR – MARYLAND (Magellan)

  • Bob Ehrlich (R) 46%
  • Martin O’Malley (D-inc) 43%